The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [438]
Rain fell all over the Delta that October. It was pouring on every stretch of the soggy plains, on the cottonfields, on Poverty Point all the way eastward across the Mississippi River to Port Gibson, and on the dark, sinuous Mississippi riptide. It was falling, too, on the federal cemetery on the bluff in Vicksburg, where Union and Confederate soldiers lay under marble slabs. It rained heavily on every interesting wildlife-rich area along the Tensas River bottomland hardwoods, open water pools, and old runs as Roosevelt’s party set up a tent camp near Bear Lake, everything turning into a dull mud.
The Roosevelt party was in the thickest patch of this hardwood habitat. Bottomland forests were rapidly being clear-cut for conversion into agricultural areas. So there was a sense that this was the “last” hunt. Garfish were caught. An alligator slid into the water, and a couple of crows pecked for food in a field. Black squirrels made a commotion in the trees, living in easy community with wood rats. The swamp rabbits were amphibious, behaving like muskrats. Bats bawked. Roosevelt described the snapping turtles he encountered as “fearsome brutes of the slime, as heavy as man, and with huge horny beaks that with a single snap could take off a man’s hand or foot.”53
The Louisiana Canebreak was a place where a man could die and not even be noticed. The fleas had disappeared, and even though winter was approaching, the oak trees weren’t bare. “Palmettos grow thickly in places,” Roosevelt wrote. “The canebrakes stretch along the slight rises of ground, often extending for miles, forming one of the most striking and interesting features of the country. They choke out other growths, the feathery, graceful canes standing in ranks, tall, slender, serried, each but a few inches from his brother, and springing to a height of fifteen or twenty feet. They look like bamboos; they are well-nigh impenetrable to a man on horseback; even on foot they make difficult walking unless free use is made of the heavy bush-knife.”54
Clearly this fourteen-day hunt wasn’t a dignified sport like shooting quail in the sedge. Roosevelt grew perturbed when he was told that there were only four or five bears left in the Louisiana canebrakes (although bears were reported regularly in the more western parishes of Ouachita and Lincoln). As the world’s leading advocate of wildlife protection, Roosevelt could have called it quits and headed back to Memphis and the silk bedsheets of the Peabody Hotel. Instead he started insisting that the Mississippi tracker Holt Collier was needed lickety-split. Collier could definitely find a Louisiana black bear (Ursus americanus luteolus) in high water. It seemed that Roosevelt had entered the realm of fantasy, barking orders like a colonel while also imagining that he was the type of old-fashioned bayou character Mayne Reid had written about in The Boy Hunters. To understand Roosevelt’s hunt in the canebrakes, it is necessary to realize that he wasn’t after just any bear. He wanted a Louisiana black bear, distinguished by having a longer, narrower snout than most bears, and one of the sixteen recognized subspecies of black bears in America. Long ago this subspecies had been widespread from Mexico to Canada, but now it was dwindling under the pressure of human encroachment. Roosevelt wanted to shoot one to use for a museum display.
Soaked and disgruntled, Roosevelt remained determined. There was no way he was going be denied this trophy, as he had been in 1902. He wasn’t going